Indigenous languages must feature more in science communication

Indigenous languages must feature more in science communication
Introducing rural and indigenous communities to science, through experiments and communication, is vital. Credit: Felipe Figueira

There is no denying that English is one of the world's major languages. It's the mother tongue of nearly 370 million people. English is also very frequently used by scientists in academic journals and book chapters, along with other common languages like French, Spanish and Portuguese.





The languages include Tsonga (also known as Changana and spoken in Mozambique, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe) and Guarani, an indigenous from Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina.

This and similar initiatives are crucial if scientists are to properly communicate the knowledge they've produced; sometimes with the very communities they study or which are affected, in their own languages.


Opening up science

Open communication has long been seen as a fundamental condition for scientific development. The advent of the internet made even greater, more open communication possible. A scientist can write an article that is available in an online journal or record a video that's uploaded to YouTube. But what about scientists who don't speak English, or users who might be interested in what's being shared but don't speak English?





There have been similar competitions elsewhere in the world that required entrants to work in either English or French. We created a video competition for African and Latin American graduate students across scientific disciplines, asking that their research be presented in a three minute in either English, French, Portuguese or Spanish. There were 55 entrants.


Tough translation

A network of institutions and people representing different regions of Africa and Latin America were involved in this initiative. Their home languages and those of the people they worked decided what languages we'd translate videos into. We also relied on them to be our translators – and they didn't always find this an easy task.

Many of the scientific terms used in the videos did not exist in the indigenous languages we'd chosen. In these instances, we kept words in French, English, Portuguese or Spanish. For example, Portuguese words can be found in the middle of the Guarani subtitles.


The competition was based entirely on voluntary work. We had practically no funding. For the next edition, we're hoping to find some kind of sponsorship, particularly to offer winners material prizes like goods, money or travel expenses to attend an international scientific meeting.

We are trying to find new translators for Quechua (an Andean language), Berber (from North Africa), Chinese and as many we can get. For this to happen, we'll need to find more volunteer translators.

This is a new way of thinking about science communication: it's the kind of people we reach, not the number, that matters. And it's worked. When the Imagine project was launched, we were told that indigenous Brazilian people would be not interested in learning basic science such as genetics and molecular biology. The critics have been proved wrong.


Our long term goal is to get more indigenous and rural people to become real scientists. This is already happening in Brazil: one of our collaborators, Joana Mongelo, is the first Guarani master's graduate in the south of the country.

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Provided by The Conversation


Citation: Indigenous languages must feature more in science communication (2017, December 19) retrieved 5 June 2020 from https://phys.org/news/2017-12-indigenous-languages-feature-science.html

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